With so many crossovers, collaborations and Fortnite seasons out there, it's starting to feel like entertainment – video games in particular – is just becoming this big amorphous mass of IP and corporate synergy. In the same way that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon serves to connect the various facets of the film world, attempts to do the same for gaming have popped up as well, chief among them the the Ryu Number.
The theory goes like this: Street Fighter is so immensely popular and the gaming industry so cynically self-cannibalistic that any video game character can be connected back to Ryu, the franchise's mascot. The talking joker card from Balatro has a Ryu Number. Will Ferrell's Buddy the Elf has a Ryu Number. Richard Nixon has a Ryu Number.
The existence of the Ryu Number serves as a sobering reminder that none of us are free of the ouroboros of corporate synergy – and more importantly, none of us are free of Ryu. Take a scroll through the blog yourself and you'll be astounded at just how many characters seem to link back to Ryu, regardless of their obscurity. If we must live through the death and hypercommodification of art in our lifetime, at least we got a pretty fun battle royale out of it.
